The articles presented in this Section appear to come into one of the
categories defined on p. 1110 of The Urantia Book by which the Revelators
were permitted to eliminate error, restore lost knowledge, fill missing
gaps or supply cosmic data to illuminate spiritual teachings.

What Makes Stars Shine? "In those suns which are encircuited in
the space-energy channels, solar energy is liberated by various complex
nuclear-reaction chains, the most common of which is the hydrogen-carbon-helium
reaction. In this metamorphosis, carbon acts as an energy catalyst since
it is in no way actually changed by this process of converting hydrogen
into helium. Under certain conditions of high temperature the hydrogen
penetrates the carbon nuclei. Since the carbon cannot hold more than four
such protons, when this saturation state is attained, it begins to emit
protons as fast as new ones arrive. In this reaction the ingoing hydrogen
particles come forth as a helium atom". (464) "All of these phenomena
are indicative of enormous energy expenditure, and the sources of solar
energy, named in the order of their importance, are: "1. Annihilation
of atoms and, eventually, of electrons...." (463)

In 1934, when the Paper providing this information about sources of
solar energy was received, the detail of the conversion of hydrogen to
helium, as postulated by J. Perrin in 1920, was unknown. Two main processes
for this conversion are the proton-proton chain proposed by H.A. Bethe
and C.L. Critchfield in 1938, and the carbon-nitrogen cycle proposed independently
by Bethe and by von Weizsacker in 1939. Naturally, Gardner claims that
Dr Sadler added the information on the carbon cycle subsequently to Bethe's
publications.

The carbon-nitrogen cycle that converts hydrogen to helium with the
release of energy is a catalytic reaction in which carbon enters and leaves
the reaction apparently unscathed. In actuality, it is a very complex reaction
in which several isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are generated
before ordinary carbon is regenerated and helium emerges. The simplicity
of the wording of the Urantia Paper quotation from p. 464 arouses no confidence
in the postulate that the writer was familiar with Bethe's work.

The quotation from p. 463 is also mentioned by Gardner (p. 189) but
in this instance it is misquoted in an attempt to ridicule the science
content of the Urantia Papers. Gardner sets this in the context of being
in the original text, hence (according to Gardner) could not be altered
or removed. He states:

"It is now known that the sun's radiant energy is produced by a
thermonuclear reaction in which hydrogen is converted into a variety of
helium. No electrons or protons are destroyed by this process. When the
Urantia Papers were written it was widely believed that the sun's radiant
energy came from the annihilation of atoms and protons. As Sir James Jeans
says in The Universe Around Us, the sun's energy ‘originates out of electrons
and protons. The sun is destroying its substance in order that we may live.'
This notion is the view taken by the UB. The main source of the energy,
the UB asserts (on page 463) is ‘the annihilation of atoms and eventually,
of protons.'" Gardner got it wrong

The actual wording in the Urantia Papers is "the annihilation of
atoms and, eventually, electrons." Gardner has substituted "protons"
for "electrons" apparently in conformity with his quotation from
Jeans. The comment that no electrons or protons are destroyed in the process
seems to be his own and is incorrect. The overall process is that four
atoms of hydrogen, consisting of four protons and four electrons, become
a single atom of helium having two protons, two neutrons, and two electrons.
Whether the process is the proton-proton chain (thought to be dominant
in stars such as our sun) or via the carbon-nitrogen cycle (dominant in
larger, hotter stars), in each process two positrons (anti-electrons) are
released and annihilate by interacting with two electrons. Hence the statement
in the Urantia Paper that the annihilation of atoms and, eventually, of
electrons is of first importance for the production of solar energy is
quite correct and perhaps is also prophetic concerning the proton-proton
chain for helium production proposed by Bethe and Critchfield in 1938.

Some Particle Physics

1. "The charged protons and the uncharged neutrons of the nucleus
of the atom are held together by the reciprocating function of the mesotron,
a particle of matter 180 times as heavy as the electron. Without this arrangement
the electric charge carried by the protons would be disruptive of the atomic
nucleus." 2. "As atoms are constituted, neither electric nor
gravitational forces could hold the nucleus together. The integrity of
the nucleus is maintained by the reciprocal cohering function of the mesotron,
which is able to hold charged and uncharged particles together because
of superior force-mass power and by the further function of causing protons
and neutrons constantly to change places. The mesotron causes the electric
charge of the nuclear particles to be incessantly tossed back and forth
between protons and neutrons. At one infinitesimal part of a second a given
nuclear particle is a charged proton and the next an uncharged neutron.
And these alternations of energy status are so unbelievably rapid that
the electric charge is deprived of all opportunity to function as a disruptive
influence. Thus does the mesotron function as an ‘energy-carrier' particle
which mightily contributes to the nuclear stability of the atom."
(479) For me, the statements reviewed in this article, coming from a Urantia
Paper said to have been written in 1934, are truly remarkable. I first
read them in the early 1970's, and recognized paragraphs 1 and 2 as the
basic postulates of a theory for which Japanese physicist, Hideki Yukawa,
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948. From the 1950's to the 1970's, particle
physics was in a state of confusion because of the multitudes of sub-atomic
particles that came spewing forth from particle accelerators. As new concepts
and discoveries were announced, I kept noting them in the margins of page
479, which eventually became somewhat messy and confusing. At times I felt
that there was not much that was right on this page, at other times I marveled
at its accuracy.

In recent years, a considerable amount of information has been forthcoming
on the history of development of the present "standard model"
for atomic structure. Though recognized as being incomplete, the standard
model has enormously increased our understanding of the basic nature of
matter. The electromagnetic force and the weak force of radioactive decay
have been successfully unified to to yield the "electroweak"
theory. As yet this has not been unified with the theory of the "strong"
force that holds the atomic nucleus together. The force of gravity remains
intractable to unification with the others.

Photon exchange in electromagnetism provides a model

In the quantum theory of electromagnetism, two charged particles interact
when one emits a photon and the other absorbs it. In 1932 Yukawa had decided
to attempt a similar approach to describe the nuclear force field. He wrote,
"...it seemed likely that the nuclear force was a third fundamental
force, unrelated to gravitation or electromagnetism...which could also
find expression as a field...Then if one visualizes the force field as
a game of ‘catch' between protons and neutrons, the crux of the problem
would be to find the nature of the ‘ball' or particle." This work
was first published in Japanese in 1935, but was not well known in the
U.S.A.

At first, Yukawa followed the work of Heisenberg and used a field of
electrons to supply the nuclear force between protons and neutrons. This
led to intractable problems. In 1934 he decided "to look no longer
among the known particles for the particle of the nuclear force field.
He wrote: "The crucial point came one night in October. The nuclear
force is effective at extremely small distances, on the order of 0.02 trillionth
of a centimeter. My new insight was the realization that this distance
and the mass of the new particle I was seeking are inversely related to
each other." He realized he could make the range of the nuclear force
correct if he allowed the ball in the game of "catch" to be heavy—approximately
200 times heavier than the electron.

For a short time, Yukawa's "ball" became known as a "mesotron"
but was soon shortened to meson. The word came to apply to a range of energy-carrying
particles with similarities to the photon. 3. "The presence and function
of the mesotron also explains another atomic riddle. When atoms perform
radioactively, they emit far more energy than would be expected. This excess
of radiation is derived from the breaking up of the mesotron ‘energy carrier,'
which thereby becomes a mere electron. The mesotronic disintegration is
also accompanied by the emission of certain small uncharged particles."
(479)

This statement extends Fermi's 1934 theory of radioactive decay of the
neutron. Yukawa had considered that a "mesotron" might also act
as the "ball" in the "catch" game during radioactive
decay. After re-running his calculations, in 1938 he published a paper
predicting the properties of such a mesotron which he now called a "weak"
photon. Eventually it became known as the "W" particle.

Two different "mesotrons"

Since it is destined to give rise to a negatively charged electron,
this "mesotron" of radioactive decay, as described in the Urantia
Paper, is obviously differentiated from the "mesotron" that shuttles
positive charge between protons and neutrons. The Paper also connects it
to the production of small uncharged particles, which would receive the
name "neutrinos."

Para's 1-3 come close to being the contemporary, but incredibly speculative,
science of the middle to late 1930's. They describe three hypothetical
particles—the pion "mesotron" (found 1947), the W particle "mesotron"
(found 1983), and the small uncharged particles, "neutrinos"
( found 1956).

The para 2. comment stating, "the alternations of energy status
are unbelievably rapid..." is interesting. Because of its placement
in the text, it qualifies only that "mesotron" that shuttles
charge between the protons and the neutrons and not the "mesotron"
of radioactive decay. According to Nobel Prize winner, Steven Weinberg
(1992), these alternations occur in the order of a million, million, million,
millionth of a second. In contrast, the "mesotron"-mediated radioactive
decay process described in para. 3 takes about a hundredth of a second.
Together these three statements in the Urantia Paper indicate that the
author had an extensive knowledge of theoretical nuclear physics—a rare
individual indeed, and especially so prior to the race to build the atomic
bomb.

An unknown component of the nuclear binding force 4."The mesotron
explains certain cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus, but it does
not account for the cohesion of proton to proton nor for the adhesion of
neutron to neutron. The paradoxical and powerful force of atomic cohesive
integrity is a form of energy as yet undiscovered on Urantia." (479)

This statement from the Urantia Paper definitely states that the "mesotron"
that shuttles positive charge between protons and neutrons does not account
for certain special cohesive properties of the atomic nucleus. It then
tells us that there is an aspect of this force that is as yet undiscovered
on Urantia.

Leon Lederman was a young research worker in 1950 who later became director
of the Fermi Laboratory. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988. In his
book, The God Particle, he comments: "The hot particle of 1950 was
the pion or pi meson (Yukawa's mesotron), as it is also called. The pion
had been predicted in 1936 by a Japanese theoretical physicist, Hideki
Yukawa. It was thought to be the key to the strong force, which in those
days was the big mystery. Today we think of the strong force in terms of
gluons. But back then (i.e. 1950's), pions which fly back and forth between
the protons to hold them together tightly in the nucleus were the key,
and we needed to make and study them."

This force, unknown in 1934, (and for that matter in 1955 when The Urantia
Book was published) is now known as the color force. Writing about it in
their book, The Particle Explosion, Close, Marten, and Sutton state, "Back
in the 1940's and 1950's, theorists thought that pions were the transmitters
of the strong force. But experiments later showed that pions and other
hadrons are composite particles, built from quarks, and the theory of the
strong force had to be revised completely. We now believe that it is the
color within the proton and the neutron that attracts them to each other
to build nuclei. This process may have similarities to the way that electrical
charge within atoms manages to build up complex molecules. Just as electrons
are exchanged between atoms bound within a molecule, so are quarks and
anti-quarks—in clusters we call ‘pions'—exchanged between the protons and
neutrons in a nucleus."

The quest for the "ultimon"

The mandate to the revelators permitted "the supplying of information
which will fill in vital missing gaps in otherwise earned knowledge."
(1110) Whether any physicist ever effectively utilized the information
in para. 4 of page 479, we will probably never know. But there are "more
things on heaven and earth"... For example, "Physics, it is hoped,
will one day reach the ultimate level of nature in which everything can
be described and from which the entire universe develops. This belief could
be called the quest for the ultimon." (from E. David Peat, 1988, Superstrings
and the Search for the Theory of Everything.) There is a curious coincidence
here. The particle the Urantia Papers called a mesotron became shortened
to meson. It calls the basic building block of matter an ultimaton. Will
it one day be identified with the ultimon?

"In large suns when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction
ensues, and such a body is not sufficiently opaque to retain the internal
pressure of support for the outer gas regions, then a sudden collapse occurs.
The gravity-electric changes give origin to vast quantities of tiny particles
devoid of electric potential, and such particles readily escape from the
solar interior thus bringing about the collapse of a gigantic sun within
a few days." (464)

No tiny particles devoid of electric potential that could escape readily
from the interior of a collapsing star had been shown to exist in 1934.
In fact, the reality of such particles were not confirmed until 1956, one
year after the publication of The Urantia Book. The existence of particles
that might have such properties had been put forward as a suggestion by
Wolfgang Pauli in 1932, because studies on radioactive beta decay of atoms
had indicated that a neutron could decay to a proton and an electron, but
measurements had shown that the combined mass energy of the electron and
proton did not add up to that of the neutron. To account for the missing
energy, Pauli suggested a little neutral particle was emitted, and then,
on the same day, while lunching with the eminent astrophysicist Walter
Baade, Pauli commented that he had done the worst thing a theoretical physicist
could possibly do, he had proposed a particle that could never be discovered
because it had no properties. Not long after, Enrico Fermi took up Pauli's
idea and attempted to publish a paper on the subject in the prestigious
science journal Nature. The editors rejected Fermi's paper on the grounds
that it was too speculative. This was in 1933, the year before receipt
of the relevant Urantia Paper. An interesting thing to note is the Urantia
Book statement that tiny particles devoid of electric potential would be
released in vast quantities during the collapse of the star. If, in 1934,
an author other than a knowledgeable particle physicist was prophesying
about the formation of a neutron star (a wildly speculative proposal from
Zwicky and Baade in the early 1930's), then surely that author would have
been thinking about the reversal of beta radioactive decay in which a proton,
an electron and Pauli's little neutral particle would be squeezed together
to form a neutron.

For this to occur an electron and a proton have to be compressed to
form a neutron but somehow they would have to add a little neutral particle
in order to make up for the missing mass-energy. Thus, in terms of speculative
scientific concepts in 1934, The Urantia Book appears to have put things
back to front, it has predicted a vast release of LNP's, when the reversal
of radioactive beta decay would appear to demand that LNPs should disappear.

The idea of a neutron star was considered to be highly speculative right
up until 1967. Most astronomers believed that stars of average size, like
our sun, up to and including stars that are very massive, finished their
lives as white dwarfs. The theoretical properties of neutron stars were
just too preposterous; for example, a thimbleful would weigh about 100
million tonnes. A favored alternative proposal was that large stars were
presumed to blow off their surplus mass a piece at a time until they got
below 1.4 solar masses (known as the Chandrasekhar limit) when they could
retire as respectable white dwarfs. This process did not entail the release
of vast quantities of tiny particles devoid of electric potential that
accompany star collapse as described in the cited Urantia Book quotation.

Neutron stars: Undetectable figments
of the imagination

Distinguished Russian astrophysicist, Igor Novikov, has written, "Apparently
no searches in earnest for neutron stars or black holes were attempted
by astronomers before the 1960s. It was tacitly assumed that these objects
were far too eccentric and most probably were the fruits of theorists'
wishful thinking. Preferably, one avoided speaking about them. Sometimes
they were mentioned vaguely with a remark yes, they could be formed, but
in all likelihood this had never happened. At any rate, if they existed,
then they could not be detected."

Acceptance of the existence of neutron stars gained ground slowly with
discoveries accompanying the development of radio and X-ray astronomy.
The Crab nebula played a central role as ideas about it emerged in the
decade, 1950-1960. Originally observed as an explosion in the sky by Chinese
astronomers in 1054, the Crab nebula became the subject of increased interest
when, in 1958, Walter Baade reported visual observations suggesting moving
ripples in its nebulosity. When sensitive electronic devices replaced the
photographic plate as a means of detection, the oscillation frequency of
what was thought to be a white dwarf star at the center of the Crab nebula
turned out to be about 30 times per second.

A rapidly rotating white dwarf star would disintegrate

For a white dwarf star with a diameter in the order of 1000 km, a rotation
rate of even once per second would cause it to disintegrate due to centrifugal
forces. Hence, this remarkably short pulsation period implied that the
object responsible for the light variations must be very much smaller than
a white dwarf, and the only possible contender for such properties appeared
to be a neutron star. Final acceptance came with pictures of the center
of the Crab nebula beamed back to earth by the orbiting Einstein X-ray
observatory in 1967. These confirmed and amplified the evidence obtained
by prior observations made with both light and radio telescopes.

The reversal of beta-decay, as depicted in equation 2 [previous page]
involves a triple collision, an extremely improbable event, unless two
of the components combine in a meta-stable state—a fact not likely to be
obvious to a non-expert observer.

The probable evolutionary course of collapse of massive stars has only
been elucidated since the advent of fast computers. Such stars begin life
composed mainly of hydrogen gas that burns to form helium. The nuclear
energy released in this way holds off the gravitational urge to collapse.
With the hydrogen in the central core exhausted, the core begins to shrink
and heat up, making the outer layers expand. With the rise in temperature
in the core, helium fuses to give carbon and oxygen, while the hydrogen
around the core continues to make helium. At this stage the star expands
to become a red giant. After exhaustion of helium at the core, gravitational
contraction again occurs and the rise in temperature permits carbon to
burn to yield neon, sodium, and magnesium, after which the star begins
to shrink to become a blue giant. Neon and oxygen burning follow. Finally
silicon and sulfur, the products from burning of oxygen, ignite to produce
iron. Iron nuclei cannot release energy on fusing together, hence with
the exhaustion of its fuel source, the furnace at the center of the star
goes out. Nothing can now slow the onslaught of gravitational collapse,
and when the iron core reaches a critical mass of 1.4 times the mass of
our sun, and the diameter of the star is about half that of the earth,
the star's fate is sealed.

Within a few tenths of a second, the iron ball collapses to about 50
kilometers across and then the collapse is halted as its density approaches
that of the atomic nucleus and the protons and neutrons cannot be further
squeezed together. The halting of the collapse sends a tremendous shock
wave back through the outer region of the core.

The light we see from our sun comes only from its outer surface layer.
However, the energy that fuels the sunlight (and life on earth) originates
from the hot, dense thermonuclear furnace at the Sun's core. Though sunlight
takes only about eight minutes to travel from the sun to earth, the energy
from the sun's core that gives rise to this sunlight takes in the order
of a million years to diffuse from the core to the surface. In other words,
a sun (or star) is relatively "opaque" (as per The Urantia Book,
p. 464) to the energy diffusing from its thermonuclear core to its surface,
hence it supplies the pressure necessary to prevent gravitational collapse.
But this is not true of the little neutral particles, known since the mid
1930's by the name neutrinos. These particles are so tiny and unreactive
that their passage from our sun's core to its exterior takes only about
3 seconds.

It is because neutrinos can escape so readily that they have a critical
role in bringing about the star's sudden death and the ensuing explosion.
Neutrinos are formed in a variety of ways, many as neutrino-antineutrino
pairs from highly energetic gamma rays. Others arise as the compressed
protons capture an electron (or expel a positron) to become neutrons, a
reaction that is accompanied by the release of a neutrino. Something in
the order of 1057 electron neutrinos are released in this way. Neutral
current reactions from Zo particles of the weak force also contribute electron
neutrinos along with the "heavy" muon and tau neutrinos.

Escape of the tiny neutral particles enables a supernova explosion

Together, these neutrinos constitute a "vast quantity of tiny particles
devoid of electric potential" that readily escape from the star's
interior. Calculations indicate that they carry ninety-nine percent of
the energy released in the final supernova explosion. The gigantic flash
of light that accompanies the explosion accounts for only a part of the
remaining one percent! Although the bulk of the neutrinos and anti-neutrinos
is released during the final explosion, they are also produced at the enormous
temperatures reached by the inner core during final stages of contraction.

The opportunity to confirm the release of the neutrinos postulated to
accompany the spectacular death of a giant star came in 1987 when a supernova
explosion, visible to the naked eye, occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud
that neighbors our Milky Way galaxy. Calculations indicated that this supernova,
dubbed SN1987A, should give rise to a neutrino burst at a density of 50
billion per square centimeter when it finally reached the earth, even though
expanding as a spherical "surface" originating at a distance
170,000 light years away. This neutrino burst was observed in the huge
neutrino detectors at Kamiokande in Japan and at Fairport, Ohio, in the
USA lasting for a period of just 12 seconds, and confirming the computer
simulations that indicated they should diffuse through the dense core relatively
slowly. From the average energy and the number of "hits" by the
neutrinos in the detectors, it was possible to estimate that the energy
released by SN1987 amounted to 2-3 x 1053 ergs. This is equal to the calculated
gravitational binding energy that would be released by the collapsing core
of a star of about 1.5 solar masses to the diameter of a neutron star.
Thus SN1987A provided a remarkable confirmation of the general picture
of neutron star formation developed over the last fifty years. Importantly,
it also confirmed that The Urantia Book had its facts right long before
the concept of neutrino-yielding neutron stars achieved respectability.

"In large suns when hydrogen is exhausted and gravity contraction
ensues, and such a body is not sufficiently opaque to retain the internal
pressure of support for the outer gas regions, then a sudden collapse occurs.
The gravity-electric changes give origin to vast quantities of tiny particles
devoid of electric potential, and such particles readily escape from the
solar interior thus bringing about the collapse of a gigantic sun within
a few days." (p. 464) For the mid-thirties that was quite a statement.
These tiny particles that we now call neutrinos were entirely speculative
in the early 1930's and were required to account for the missing mass-energy
of beta radioactive decay. Hypotheses on the possible origins of the Urantia
Paper's statement on solar collapse

In the early 1930's, the idea that supernova explosions could occur
and result in the formation of neutron stars was extensively publicized
by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology (Caltec) who
worked in Professor Millikan's dept. For a period during the mid-thirties,
Zwicky was also at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sadler is said to have
known Millikan. So alternative possibilities for the origin of The Urantia
Book quote above could be:

1. The revelators followed their mandate and used a human source of
information about supernovae, possibly Zwicky.

2. Dr Sadler had learned about the tiny particles devoid of electric
potential from either Zwicky, Millikan, or some other knowledgeable person
and incorporated it into The Urantia Book.

3. It is information supplied to fill missing gaps in otherwise earned
knowledge as permitted in the mandate. (1110)

Zwicky had the reputation of being a brilliant scientist but given to
much wild speculation, some of which turned out to be correct. A paper
published by Zwicky and Baade in 1934 proposed that neutron stars would
be formed in stellar collapse and that 10% of the mass would be lost in
the process. (Phys. Reviews. Vol. 45)

In Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Picador,
London, 1994), a book that covers the work and thought of this period in
detail, K.S. Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltec,
writes: "In the early 1930's, Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade joined
forces to study novae, stars that suddenly flare up and shine 10,000 times
more brightly than before. Baade was aware of tentative evidence that,
besides ordinary novae, there existed superluminous novae. These were roughly
of the same brightness but since they were thought to occur in nebulae
far out beyond our Milky Way, they must signal events of extraordinary
magnitude. Baade collected data on six such novae that had occurred during
the current century.

"As Baade and Zwicky struggled to understand supernovae, James
Chadwick, in 1932, reported the discovery of the neutron. This was just
what Zwicky required to calculate that if a star could be made to implode
until it reached the density of the atomic nucleus, it might transform
into a gas of neutrons, reduce its radius to a shrunken core, and, in the
process, lose about 10% of its mass. The energy equivalent of the mass
loss would then supply the explosive force to power a supernova.

"Zwicky did not know what might initiate implosion nor how the
core might behave as it imploded. Hence he could not estimate how long
the process might take—is it a slow contraction or a high-speed implosion?
Details of this process were not worked out until the 1960's and later.

"At this time (1932-33), cosmic rays were receiving much attention
and Zwicky, with his love of extremes, managed to convince himself that
most of the cosmic rays (correctly) were coming from outside our solar
system and (incorrectly) that most were from far outside our Milky Way
galaxy—indeed from the most distant reaches of the universe—and he then
convinced himself (roughly correctly) that the total energy carried by
all of the universe's cosmic rays was about the same as the total energy
released by supernovae throughout the universe. The conclusion was obvious
to Zwicky. Cosmic rays must be made in supernova explosions." Baade
and Zwicky's paper of 1934 asserted unequivocally the existence of supernovae
as a distinct class of astronomical objects different from ordinary novae.
It estimated the total energy released (10% of solar mass), and proposed
that the core would consist of neutrons, a speculation that was not accepted
as theoretically viable until 1939 nor verified observationally until 1967
with the discovery of pulsars—spinning, magnetized neutron stars inside
the exploding gas of ancient supernovae. Information, extracted from Thorne's
recent book, indicates that Zwicky knew nothing about the possible role
of "little neutral particles" in the implosion of a neutron star,
but rather that he attributed the entire mass-energy loss to cosmic rays.
So, if not from Zwicky, what then is the human origin of The Urantia Book's
statement that the neutrinos escaping from its interior bring about the
collapse of the imploding star? (Current estimates attribute about 99%
of the energy of a supernova explosion to being carried off by the neutrinos).

In his book, Thorne further states: "Astronomers in the 1930's
responded enthusiastically to the Baade-Zwicky concept of a supernova,
but treated Zwicky's neutron star and cosmic ray ideas with disdain...In
fact it is clear to me from a detailed study of Zwicky's writings of the
era that he did not understand the laws of physics well enough to be able
to substantiate his ideas." This opinion was also held by Robert Oppenheimer
who published a set of papers with collaborators Volkoff, Snyder, and Tolman,
on Russian physicist Lev Landau's ideas about stellar energy originating
from a neutron core at the heart of a star. Oppenheimer ignored Zwicky's
speculative proposals, though he must have been familiar with them as he
worked about half of each year at Caltec.

The Oppenheimer papers were mainly theoretical in nature and based upon
the principles of relativistic physics. In a 1939 paper of Oppenheimer
and Snyder, since they had neither the detailed knowledge nor the computational
machinery to formulate a realistic model of a collapsing star, they took
as their starting point a star that was precisely spherical, non-spinning,
non-radiating, of uniform density and no internal pressure. Their conclusions
included that, for an observer from a static external reference frame,
the implosion of a massive star freezes at the critical circumference of
the star (i.e. where gravity becomes so strong that not even light can
escape) but, as considered from the reference frame of the star's surface,
it may continue to implode (ultimately to a Schwarzschild singularity—the
term "black hole" had yet to be invented).

Einstein and Eddington opposed neutron star concept

These Oppenheimer papers, which concluded that either neutron stars
or black holes could be the outcome of massive star implosion, were about
as far as physicists could go at that time. As a further deterrent to speculation
on the fate of imploding massive stars, the most prominent physicist of
the time, Albert Einstein, and the doyen of astronomers, Sir Arthur Eddington,
both vigorously opposed the concepts involved in stellar collapse beyond
the white dwarf stage. Thus the subject appears to have been put on hold
coincident with the outbreak of war in 1939. During the 1940's, virtually
all capable physicists were occupied with tasks relating to the war effort.
Apparently this was not so for Russian-born astronomer-physicist, George
Gamow, a professor at Leningrad who had taken up a position at George Washington
University in 1934. Gamow conceived the beginning of the Hubble expanding
universe as a thermonuclear fireball in which the original stuff of creation
was a dense gas of protons, neutrons, electrons, and gamma radiation which
transmuted by a chain of nuclear reactions into the variety of elements
that make up the world of today. Referring to this work, Overbye4 writes:
"In the forties, Gamow and a group of collaborators wrote a series
of papers spelling out the details of thermonucleogenesis. Unfortunately
their scheme didn't work. Some atomic nuclei were so unstable that they
fell apart before they could fuse again into something heavier, thus breaking
the element building chain. Gamow's team disbanded in the late 40's, its
work ignored and disdained."

Among this work was a paper by Gamow and Schoenfeld that proposed that
energy loss from aging stars would be mediated by an efflux of neutrinos.
However they also noted that "the neutrinos are still considered as
highly hypothetical particles becauseof the failure of all efforts to detect
them. Their proposal appears to have been overlooked or ignored until the
1960's.

Conservation of energy "law" under fire

Pauli's suggestion about the necessary existence of the tiny unknown
particle devoid of electric potential that we now call the neutrino was
made just prior to Chadwick's discovery of the neutron in 1932. The name,
neutrino, was suggested by Enrico Fermi. In beta decay, when a neutron
breaks down to a proton and an electron, the loss in mass is 0.00029 on
the atomic weight scale, approximately the mass of half an electron. In
some decay events, the electron gets most of the missing mass-energy in
the form of kinetic energy. Since the missing particle must also have kinetic
energy it became clear that it must be massless or very close thereto.
Many thought it must be massless like the photon and travel with the velocity
of light. Although no one wanted to abandon the law of conservation of
energy, there was considerable doubt about saving it by means of a particle
without charge and probably without mass, a particle that could never be
detected and whose sole reason for existence was merely to save a law.
[Note: In 1957, the 30-year old law of conservation of parity was shown
to be violated during neutrino emission in beta radioactive decay.]

As time went by, the need for the neutrino grew, not only to save the
law of conservation of energy, but also conservation of momentum, angular
momentum (spin), and lepton number. As knowledge of what it ought to be
like grew, and as knowledge accrued from the intense efforts to produce
the atom bomb, possible means of detecting this particle began to emerge.
In 1953, experiments were begun by a team led by C.L. Cowan and F. Reines.1
Fission reactors were now in existence in which the breakdown of uranium
yielded free neutrons that, outside of the atomic nucleus, were unstable
and broke down via beta decay to yield a proton, an electron, and, if it
existed, the missing particle. The fission reactor chosen at Savannah River,
North Carolina was estimated to provide 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 each
second. These should be antineutrinos.

Detection of the elusive neutrino

The Cowan and Reines team devised a scheme to feed the antineutrinos
from the reactor into a target consisting of water. Each water molecule
consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen, and the nuclei of the hydrogen
atoms are protons. A scintillator substance was added to the water contained
in a series of tanks surrounded by scintillation detectors. If an antineutrino
was absorbed by a proton, the expectation was that a neutron and a positron
(antielectron) would be formed. In such an environment the positron should
collide with an electron within about a millionth of a second, and the
two should annihilate with the production of two gamma ray photons shot
out in exactly opposite directions. An added refinement was detection of
the newly formed neutron which, in the presence of cadmium ions, would
immediately be taken into the cadmium nucleus with emission of photons
with combined energy of 9 Mev. Detection of this sequence of events would
herald the existence of the antineutrino. In 1956 this system was detecting
70 such events per day with the fission reactor operating over and above
the background noise with the reactor shut off. It now remained to prove
that this particle was not its own antiparticle, as is the case with the
photon. This was done by R.R. Davis in 19561, using a system designed specifically
to detect expected neutrino properties, but testing for those properties
with antineutrinos deriving from a fission reactor. The negative results
so obtained provided evidence for there being two different particles.
Confirmation of the existence of the neutrino (as distinct from the anti-neutrino)
was obtained in 1965 when neutrinos from the sun were detected in huge
perchloroethylene tanks placed far underground. Renewal of the search for
the neutron star

The subject of the fate of imploding stars re-opened with vigor when
both Robert Oppenheimer and John Wheeler, two of the really great names
of physics, attended a conference in Brussels in 1958. Oppenheimer believed
that his 1939 papers said all that needed to be said about such implosions.
Wheeler disagreed, wanting to know what went on beyond the well-established
laws of physics.

When Oppenheimer and Snyder did their work in 1939, it had been hopeless
to compute the details of the implosion. In the meantime, nuclear weapons
design had provided the necessary tools because, to design a bomb, nuclear
reactions, pressure effects, shock waves, heat, radiation, and mass ejection
had to be taken into account. Wheeler realized that his team had only to
rewrite their computer programs so as to simulate implosion rather than
explosion. However his hydrogen bomb team had been disbanded and it fell
to Stirling Colgate at Livermore, in collaboration with Richard White and
Michael May, to do these simulations. Wheeler learned of the results and
was largely responsible for generating the enthusiasm to follow this line
of research. The term ‘black hole' was coined by Wheeler.

The theoretical basis for supernova explosions is said to have been
laid by E. M. Burbidge, G.R. Burbidge, W. A. Fowler, and Fred Hoyle in
a 1957 paper2. However, even in Hoyle and Narlikar's text book, The Physics-Astronomy
Frontier (1980), no consideration is given to a role for neutrinos in the
explosive conduction of energy away from the core of a supernova. In their
1957 paper, Hoyle and his co-workers proposed that when the temperature
of an aging massive star rises to about 7 billion degrees K, iron is rapidly
converted into helium by a nuclear process that absorbs energy. In meeting
the sudden demand for this energy, the core cools rapidly and shrinks catastrophically,
implodes in seconds, and the outer envelope crashes into it. As the lighter
elements are heated by the implosion they burn so rapidly that the envelope
is blasted into space. So, two years after the first publication of The
Urantia Book, the most eminent authorities in the field of star evolution
make no reference to the "vast quantities of tiny particles devoid
of electric potential" that the book says escape from the star interior
to bring about its collapse. Instead they invoke the conversion of iron
to helium, an energy consuming process now thought not to be of significance.

Following on from the forgotten Gamow and Schoenfeld paper, the next
suggestion that neutrinos may have a role in supernovae came from Ph.D.
student Hong-Yee Chiu, working under Philip Morrison. Chiu proposed that
towards the end of the life of a massive star, the core would reach temperatures
of about 3 billion degrees at which electron-positron pairs would be formed
and a tiny fraction of these pairs would give rise to neutrino-antineutrino
pairs. Chiu speculated that X-rays would be given off by the star for about
1000 years and that the temperature would ultimately reach about 6 billion
degrees when an iron core would form at the central region of the star.
The flux of neutrino-antineutrino pairs would then be sufficiently great
to carry off the explosive energy of the star in a single day. The 1000-year
period predicted by Chiu for X-ray emission was reduced to about one year
by later workers. Chiu's proposals appear to have been first published
in a Ph. D. thesis submitted at Cornell University in 1959. Scattered references
to it are made by Philip Morrison3 and by Isaac Asimov1.

No neutral current, no supernova

Dennis Overbye, in his book Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos4 records that,
for supernovae, almost all the energy of the inward free fall comes out
in the form of neutrinos. The success of this scenario (as proposed by
Chiu) depends on a feature of the weak interaction called the neutral currents.
Without this, the neutrinos do not supply enough ‘oomph' and theorists
had no good explanation for how stars explode. In actuality the existence
of the neutral current for the weak interaction was not demonstrated until
the mid 1970's.

A 1985 paper (Scientific American) by Bethe and Brown entitled "How
a Supernova Explodes" shows that understanding of the important role
of the neutrinos was well advanced by that time. These authors attribute
this understanding to the computer simulations of W. David Arnett of the
University of Chicago and Thomas Weaver and Stanford Woosley of the University
of California at Santa Cruz.

In a recent report in Sky and Telescope (August, 1995) it is stated
that, during the past decade, computer simulations of supernovae have bogged
down at 100 to 150 km from the center and failed to explode. These models
were one dimensional. With more computer power becoming available, two
dimensional simulations have now been carried out and model supernova explosions
produced. The one reported was for a 15 solar mass supernova that winds
up as a neutron star. However the authors speculate that at least some
5 to 15 solar mass implosions might wind up as black holes. There is still
a long way to go in understanding the details of stellar implosions.

Who dunit? Paring away the alternatives

Referring to our three alternatives to explain how the reference to
the role of the tiny uncharged particles in supernova explosions got to
be in the Urantia Papers, ostensibly in 1934, our investigation showed
that Zwicky is unlikely to have been the source as he firmly believed X-rays,
not neutrinos, accounted for the 10% mass loss during the death of the
star. Remembering that neutron stars were not demonstrated to exist until
1967, that some of the biggest names in physics and astronomy were totally
opposed to the concept of collapsing stars (Einstein, Eddington), and that,
well into the 1960's, the majority of astronomers assumed that massive
stars shed their bulk piecemeal prior to retiring respectably as white
dwarfs, it appears that it would have been a preposterous notion to attempt
to support the reality of a revelation by means of speculation about the
events occurring in massive star implosion at any time prior to the 1960's.
If it is assumed that, on what would have needed to be the expert advice
of a knowledgeable but reckless astrophysicist, Dr Sadler wrote the page
464 material into the Urantia Papers subsequent to the concepts on neutrinos
appearing in the Gamow et al. publications, then it becomes necessary to
ask why was it not removed when that work lost credibility later in the
1940's?—and particularly so since, in their conclusions, Gamow and Schoenfeld
drew attention to the fact that the neutrinos were still considered to
be highly hypothetical particles as well as noting that "the dynamics
of the collapse represents very serious mathematical difficulties."
Printing Plates for The Urantia Book Documents held by the Urantia Foundation
show that the contract to prepare the nickel printing plates from the manuscript
of the Urantia Papers was accepted during September, 1941. The galley proofs
from the plates were checked for typographical errors by members of Dr
Sadler's group, known as the Forum, in 1942. The Sherman affair described
in Gardner's book included an attempt by Sherman to get control of the
printing plates in 1943. These plates were held in the vaults of the printers,
R.R. Donnelley & Sons until the actual printing of The Urantia Book.
Wartime regulations prevented an early printing of the book. Later it was
delayed by the revelators.

It has already been indicated that the highly speculative 1942 paper
of Gamow and Schoenfeld was unlikely to have been the source of the book's
p.464 statement on star implosion. The evidence for the printing plates
contract makes it even less likely.

Invoking Occam's Razor

The language, level of knowledge, and terminology of the page 464 reference,
together with the references to the binding together of protons and neutrons
in the atomic nucleus, the two types of mesotron, and the involvement of
small uncharged particles in beta radioactive decay as described on page
479, is that of the early 1930's period, and not that of the 40's and 50's.
It is what would be expected from authors constrained by a mandate not
to reveal unearned knowledge except in special circumstances. Applying
the Occam's razor principle of giving preference to the simplest explanation
consistent with the facts, the most probable explanation for the aforementioned
material of page 464 must be that it is original to the Urantia Papers
as received in 1934, hence comes into the category nominated in the revelatory
mandate as information supplied to fill missing gaps in our knowledge.

"There is a curious parallel history between the histories of black
holes and continental drift. Evidence for both was already non-ignorable
by 1916, but both ideas were stopped in their tracks for half a century
by a resistance bordering on the irrational...but [resistance to] both
began to crumble around 1960." Werner Israel, quoted in K.S. Thorne
(1994) Black Holes and Time Warps (Picador, London).

The Urantia Book states quite categorically that all land on earth was
originally a single continent that subsequently broke up, commencing 750
million years ago (663), followed by a long period of continental drifting
during which land bridges were repeatedly formed and broken.

Wegener's theory The idea of continental drift was mooted in the 19th
century and first put forward as a comprehensive theory by Wegener in 1912.
It was not well accepted, being classified as pseudoscience. For example
Rollin T. Chamberlin wrote in 1928 just 6 years prior to receipt of the
Urantia Papers: "Wegener's theory in general is of the foot-less type...It
plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules..."

Chamberlin went on to list 18 points that he considered were destructive
of the drift hypothesis, and actually began his book with, "Can we
call geology a science when there exists such a difference of opinion in
fundamental matters as to make it possible for such a theory as this to
run wild?" The theory remained discredited in the opinion of most
geologists until the 1960's. The story of the earlier conflict and later
acceptance of continental drift has been recently recorded by science historian
H.E. Le Grand (see ref.).

New Evidence

The change in attitude by geologists, particularly in America, was initiated
by the careful bathymetric, paleomagnetic, and seismological surveys in
the region of long mountain ranges on the ocean floors, such as the mid-Atlantic
ridge that stretches from Iceland to Antarctica. During the 1960's, geophysical
surveys of the ocean floor revealed that the rock from the earth's mantle
is being melted, then forced upwards resulting in sea floor spreading.
This upwelling would be expected to push the continents apart, and thus
provided the missing evidence for a physical mechanism that could bring
about continental drift. Gradually the term continental drift was replaced
by a new terminology and today it is known universally as plate tectonics.

Against the current! The Urantia Papers that mention continental drift
were presented in 1934, and published in book form in 1955. The writers
of the Papers could not have been unaware of the very tenuous nature of
the theory and would have known that it was held in disrepute by most American
geologists. Hence, unless these writers had access to pre-existing knowledge,
they would appear to have been doing a very foolish thing in going against
strongly-held scientific opinion.

The Urantia Book is at variance with many published estimates of geological
time, for instance for the Carboniferous and Devonian periods where the
discrepancy may be about 100 million years. In some areas there is good
agreement; for example the book (683) talks of the disappearance of land
bridges between the Americas and Europe and Africa in the era between 160
and 170 million years ago, and an article in Scientific American, June,
1979, places this break at 165 million years ago. However land bridges
connected these continents again at later times via Greenland, Iceland,
and the Bering Strait and also connected South America to Australia via
Antarctica, and directly to Africa (The Urantia Book, pp. 694, 695, 698;
Scientific American, January 1983, p. 60).

Time of break-up of continents A most remarkable aspect of The Urantia
Book account is the statement that the breakup of the supercontinent commenced
750 million years ago. Wegener placed it at 200 million years ago. The
1984 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica's "Science and Technology"
presented what was then purported to be an up-to-date series of maps depicting
the progress of continental drift from 50 to 200 million years ago which
is at variance with a similar portrayal in the April, 1985 issue of Scientific
American by about 100 million years in aspects of the progression. Nevertheless,
both versions still placed the commencement of continental drift in the
vicinity of 200 to 250 million years ago.

Somewhere around 1980 some geologists were having a rethink about the
commencement of continental drift, and in a book entitled Genesis, published
in 1982, J. Gribbin reported the view that there may have been a pre-existing
continent, Pangea 1, roughly 600 million years ago that had broken up into
four new continents by about 450 million years ago, at the end of the Ordovician
age. Then about 200 million years ago, the continents were thought to have
converged to form Pangea 2, which quickly broke, first to Laurasia and
Gondwanaland; further breakup then occurred at the end of the Cretaceous
to give an appearance much like the present world. A different opinion
was expressed in an article in Scientific American (1984) 250 (2), 41 which
stated the view that a breakup occurred in late Ripherian times between
700 and 900 million years ago; but a 1987 article (Scientific American
256, 84) is more conservative and placed the breakup of Pangea 1 at somewhere
near the beginning of the pre-Cambrian, in the order of 600 million years
ago.

Addendum

The further development of the theory of continental drift is reviewed
by I. W. D. Dalziel in Scientific American 272 (1) 28 (1995). The date
proposed for the commencement of break-up of the first supercontinent is
now estimated as 750 million years ago—the same as is given in The Urantia
Book. Co-incidence, lucky guess, or something else???

The Urantia Book account of the geological history of our planet tells
us that, following the breakup of the supercontinent about 750 million
years ago, there have been repeated cycles of land elevation and submergence.
Between approximately 400 and 200 million years ago, the periodicity appears
to average very roughly 25 million years, with periods of much more frequent
cycling during the Carboniferous and Cretaceous periods. Changes in sea
level have often been attributed to advance and retreat of the polar ice
caps, but this would not appear to account for the movements described
in The Urantia Book. More recently a mechanism has been proposed involving
the accumulation of heat beneath the great land masses that is thought
to cause the elevation, doming, and breakup of continents, and their subsequent
rejoining. Although the concept has been put forward mainly to explain
transverse movement, it also provides a physical mechanism that could account
for the vertical movement described in The Urantia Book . The mechanism
proposed indicates a relatively slow build up of heat, but the subsequent
blow off can occur in a number of ways, hence considerable deviation from
sine wave periodicity would be expected. This theory will be of interest
to Urantia Book readers who have been puzzled by its account of the alternate
elevation and depression of continents on such a large scale.